


don't paint me black when i used to be golden

by nuricurry



Category: Saint Seiya
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, references to past Hyoga/Shun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:22:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27521485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuricurry/pseuds/nuricurry
Summary: That was what the apartment really was for when it came down to it. Storing his memories, trying to hold onto them and make them last by locking them away, as if that would keep them fresh, keep them safe.
Relationships: Cygnus Hyōga/Phoenix Ikki
Kudos: 7





	don't paint me black when i used to be golden

He’s got a flat in Omsk that uses when he needs to run away. It’s small, above a little corner shop, selling liquor and cigarettes and stale chips. It’s where he buys his rolling papers because the babushka that owns it never asks about his age. She just likes when he’s around, because he looks like her son who went off to die in the war, and he lifts heavy boxes for her and sweeps the stairs without her asking.

The room smelled old, but that was mostly because of the books that filled it, crammed into the huge bulky bookcases that Hyoga managed to squeeze in until the shelves sagged and it looked as if they might tip over. Most of the books he’d never read; they were in languages he didn’t speak, Croatian and German and Gaelic and Italian, books about science and the stars and plants and trees, books that talked about wars he had never heard of and places most of the world long-since forgot existed. They were books he had run his fingers over hundreds of times in his life, books that he could remember seeing as a child, all neatly ordered and carefully arranged. In his house, they were fit where they could, shoved on top of each other and stacked on tables and chairs, none of them given the proper place they should.

He brought Shun there once, when they were caught between figuring themselves out and needing company. He remembered what he looked like in that small room with its peeling blue floral wallpaper and water-stained ceiling. His eyes had traveled around, taking it all in– Hyoga’s unmade bed, his chipped china, the dusty lace curtains that hung in the window– and he had smiled at him and said it was lovely. What was funny was that he knew he meant it; where Hyoga saw chaos and mess, Shun saw a home, filled with things that Hyoga wanted to hold on to, things that clearly meant something, if he bought a whole apartment to put them in, rather than let them be thrown away.

They shared the bed at night, him and Shun, because there was only one and they were beyond a point of awkwardness or shame in being close to one another. They would lie on the mattress on their sides, face to face, and Shun would listen to him talk. He would tell him about how his mother gave birth to him in Moscow, but she grew up here in Omsk and he had come here hoping to find some family of his, only to learn they had all moved away or died. The house she lived in was gone, turned into a shopping center, and the only record to be found was of her was her name at the local church and the day of her baptism. They talked about the books, all collected from the cabin he lived in with Camus out in the wilderness for those eight years. He couldn’t read them all, and honestly, many of them he didn’t want to, because he was never as analytical as Camus was. He didn’t really need to know how the world worked and why it did. He just lived in the moment, he just had to make it through each day, and that was enough for him. Yet, even knowing so many of them would never be opened again, he couldn’t bear to throw any of them away. Camus had touched them at some point, his eyes had scanned them over, which meant Hyoga couldn’t get rid of a single one of them, in memory of him.

That was what the apartment really was for, when it came down to it. Storing his memories, trying to hold onto them and make them last by locking them away, as if that would keep them fresh, keep them safe. Shun, as he knew he would be, was sympathetic. He didn’t discourage his hoarding, didn’t criticize or encourage him to put those sorts of things aside. He just held his hand when Hyoga spoke about how he liked when the old lady downstairs called him ‘Pasha’ because it was like having a grandmother for the first time, he offered to get him a drink when Hyoga would get a headache from crying, he wouldn’t say anything about the creaking floorboards and lumpy mattress and leaking pipes and paper-thin walls of Hyoga’s glorified memory box. He just told him it felt like home, and offered to bring him new sheets and maybe a nice rug and a plant to liven up the space.

Shun said those things because Hyoga didn’t tell him the whole truth. Shun didn’t know about the box under the bed, the box of Camus’ clothes that he kept tucked away under lock and key. He didn’t tell him about keeping his coat, his shirts, his gloves, because they were things that Camus had worn and touched, they still held traces of his distinctive scent. He didn’t tell him that the chipped dishes they used at dinner used to be his mother’s rescued from the remains of her sunken ship years ago and hoarded in his room where no one could find them. He didn’t mention the book that had dog-eared pages about the Kraken and sirens and Leviathan, creased and folded over by what must have been a young Isaak’s hand. He didn’t tell him about how he kept those things because he believed that they might have even traces of those he lost, a bit of their smell, a strand of their hair, even fingerprints would have been enough, because it was physical proof that they had been alive, that they existed and that once, Hyoga had been able to love someone without being afraid of that love destroying them.

It wasn’t like that anymore. Hyoga had learned his lesson, had learned it in the hardest way possible.

The only person who knew about Camus’ clothes and his mother’s china and Isaak’s book was Ikki. He had found the box by accident, one time when he came to the flat broken and bleeding, uncovering it when he was left alone after Hyoga went downstairs to ask for a needle and thread to sew up the wound. Ikki claimed he had been trying to find bandages when he pulled out the box. He asked about it, because it was strange for Hyoga to have a box of clothes he never wore that would never fit him, delicately painted teacups, and a tattered book of fairytales hidden away in a box under his bed. He didn’t know why he told him– it was not as if Ikki was ever sensitive about those things, not like Shun was– but maybe it was because he wasn’t Shun or Seiya that he told him. Ikki was not someone who would look at him with pity when he talked about imagining that the book's paper had absorbed some of Isaak’s spit from licking his fingers to turn the page, or wanting to find even traces of his mother’s fingerprints on the teapot, or about wearing Camus’ coat because it was the closest he would ever get to being held in his arms again, now that the man himself was gone. Ikki just took in all that information, he just listened, his face impassive, his eyes unreadable, before he closed the chest, and put it back under the bed.

The next time Ikki was in the flat was when Hyoga brought him there because they needed to get away from everything and everyone, because he had finally talked about the fire that burned under his skin every time he was within any proximity to Ikki and Ikki echoed those words back. He hadn’t been thinking about the chest, the memories, the mementos; he was thinking about finally trying to work this fever out, but before he could, Ikki asked to see the box, and Hyoga dragged it out for him, though he didn’t understand why.

Ikki pulled something out of the inner pocket of his jacket, and placed it in the box, right on top of Hyoga’s things. It was a handkerchief, and when he gently pulled up the corner of it, he saw a dried, pressed flower tucked inside.

Ikki put his past inside of Hyoga’s memory box, and he let him, because he knew how much it hurt to carry around the love he knew killed someone. Maybe he thought it would bring them closer. Maybe he just wanted Ikki to find some illusion of comfort and peace like he had, forcing himself to think that compartmentalizing something meant it no longer affected him, when in fact the opposite was true. Maybe he just liked knowing that part of Ikki would always be within his reach, even if that was a part of him he had cut out, like one cuts out a tumor and puts it in a jar to sit on a shelf, a reminder of how terrible life can go, and how short it all is, subject to the whims and forces of fate.

Ikki comes to his flat in Omsk more than anyone else, and it becomes a place that Hyoga defines as ‘for them’. Parts of Ikki’s life navigate their way there, from socks and spare shoes to keys to his bike, and a case of his favorite beer always available in the fridge. They stay there, in the winter, and sometimes in the summer, when they’re allowed to get away and no one is asking anything of them, when they’ve paid their dues and given all there is to give. They eat overpriced takeout at the rickety table, they fuck on Hyoga’s lumpy bed, they sleep side by side together, and when he wakes up in the morning, sometimes Ikki’s still there. They brush their teeth in the same sink and Ikki’s leather jacket hangs on a hook next to the doorway, but lingers there more often than it’s missing, and it feels fragile, like a snowflake made from spun glass, but he holds onto it, as one of the few things he has that he desperately, so badly, doesn’t want to break.

But wanting things doesn’t mean they happen. Trying to be better, trying to forget that he has destroyed every person he’s ever loved, does not stop it from happening again. 

They fight. They argue. Hyoga asks him for things that Ikki won’t give him– things he says he can’t. Ikki snaps at him. He reaches his breaking point louder than Hyoga does.

“Just sit here and rot in your fucking mausoleum, Hyoga,” he tells him before he leaves, and Hyoga knows he won’t come back.

So he picks up his jacket, his fingers slipping easily over the familiar, creamy texture of the leather. He holds it, he smells it, he tries to find any traces of Ikki’s heat, of his hair or his skin, undeniable proof that this was his, that he lived and breathed in this jacket, and that he existed in a world that Hyoga lived in too, inside this flat. Then, he folds it, putting new creases in the jacket before he puts it in his box, tucking it under his bed with all the other things that belong to the people he destroyed simply by loving them.


End file.
